What should you ask before hiring an SEO agency?

What should you ask an SEO agency first?

Ask who will do the work, what you’ll get each month, how the agency decides what to do first, which tools it uses and how it’ll tie the work to enquiries and sales. Clear answers to those five show how it works before you sign, and a vague answer to any of them deserves a follow-up question.

Ask whether the person who pitches is the person who works on your account, and who writes your content. At Legit, one strategist owns the account from the audit onward. Our writers produce the pages, guides and programmatic templates, and your team reviews them for accuracy before they go live.

Get each month’s deliverables in writing, so you can check them against the report. To learn how priorities are set, ask what the agency would do first on your site and why. A good answer names problems on your site, which means someone has already looked at it.

Ask which tools it uses for crawling, rank tracking and AI citation tracking, and which of that data you’ll see in the monthly report.

Google publishes its own list of questions in Do you need an SEO?, including whether the SEO follows Google Search Essentials and will share every change it makes to your site.

Why are ranking guarantees a red flag?

A guarantee promises something no agency controls, because Google alone decides rankings. When an agency guarantees a position, ask which search terms it means and how it will get you there. The answer shows whether those terms matter to your business and whether the methods would stand up to Google’s rules.

Google’s advice on hiring an SEO says “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”, and that if an SEO guarantees first place, you should find someone else.

A guarantee can be met with rankings for terms few people search for, which are easy to reach and bring few enquiries. It can also be met with short-lived tactics, such as bought links, that lift a page for a while.

A promise about the work, such as what ships each month and which milestones you’ll review together, is easier to hold an agency to.

How should an agency earn links?

An agency should earn links by publishing content other sites want to cite and through digital PR that gets your business into publications in your field. Bought links and links made in bulk count as link spam under Google’s policies, so ask where each link came from and how the agency earned it.

Sites that break Google’s spam policies may rank lower or drop out of results altogether, and that risk sits with your site even when an agency bought the links.

The agency should be able to name each linking site and the guide, study or story that earned the link. One from a publication in your own industry, earned with something worth citing, is the kind to look for.

At Legit, our own team does the link earning and digital PR.

What should SEO reporting show?

SEO reporting should show the result as well as the early signals. Rankings and organic traffic show the work is taking hold, and enquiries and sales show whether it pays. A report that stops at rankings leaves you guessing at the return. Find out how the agency will trace enquiries back to search.

Our monthly report covers rankings, organic traffic, AI citations and the enquiries and sales we can trace to search, and your strategist goes through it with you on a review call.

Ask what the agency needs set up on your site to trace enquiries, such as tracked forms and phone numbers, and who sets it up.

Early signals arrive in a rough order, and enquiries come last. For what to expect when, read how long SEO takes to work.

Who should own your search accounts?

You should own them. Search Console, analytics, your Google Business Profile and your site’s CMS belong in your business’s name, with the agency added as a user. If you part ways, you remove its access and keep the history, the data and the listings the work built up.

If an agency sets up an account for you, ask for it under a business email address your team controls, with your team holding owner or administrator rights.

While you’re still choosing an agency, Google’s advice on hiring an SEO is to give it read access to Search Console only.

Does the agency cover AI search?

It should if you want to be cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Ask how the agency checks where you appear in those answers and how it earns citations. A full answer covers an audit of your AI visibility, content that answers questions directly, consistent brand details and monthly citation tracking.

We call this work AEO (answer engine optimisation), and our SEO audit includes a check of how you appear in AI answers today. Our guide to how to get your brand cited in AI answers covers each step, so you can judge an agency’s answer against it.

Once you have a shortlist, compare each quote with what SEO costs in India.

To see how we plan and report on SEO and AEO, start with our SEO and AEO services.